David Ignatow

In his youth, Ignatow worked in a butcher shop. He also helped out in a bindery in Brooklyn, New York, which he later owned and managed. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, he sought employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a journalist.
Ignatow's father helped him with the funding to produce his first book, Poems, in 1948. Although his book was well received, he had to continue working various jobs and find time in between to pursue writing. These jobs included work as a messenger, hospital admitting clerk, vegetable market night clerk and paper salesman. Other books followed such as The Gentle Weight Lifter and Say Pardon.
In 1962 Ignatow joined the faculty at the New School for Social Research as an instructor, and he became poetry editor of the Nation. He also served as president of the Poetry Society of America. He then began short stints at various universities, including the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas and the Vassar College. Ignatow commenced eight years at Columbia University as an adjunct professor in 1968 becoming a senior lecturer in 1977. Beginning in 1968 he also embarked on sixteen years as poet-in-residence and associate professor at the York College of the City University of New York. He became professor emeritus in 1984.
Among Ignatow's other books are Rescue the Dead, The Notebooks of David Ignatow, Facing the Tree: New Poems, Sunlight: A Sequence for My Daughter, I Have a Name, Whisper to the Earth, The One in the Many: A Poet's Memoirs and Gleanings: Uncollected Poems, 1950s and 1960s. His papers are housed at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego.

book

The Gentle Weight Lifter

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1258394669/?tag=prabook0b-20

1955

Rescue the Dead: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

(With that three-line epigraph, David Ignatow declares the...)

With that three-line epigraph, David Ignatow declares the thrust and purpose of his compelling new book. Unlike his previous work, which was written largely in reaction to the world about him—the urban landscape with its clamor and violence and business pressures—these new poems turn inward. They explore and confirm the individual in his never ending search for awareness and realization: a process in which conflict, love, sorrow, and insight in the end come together into a precarious balance that is its own form of peace.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0819510378/?tag=prabook0b-20

1968

Leaving the Door Open: Poems

(Poems consider mortality, paradise, dreams, nature, disil...)

Poems consider mortality, paradise, dreams, nature, disillusionment, the relationship between men and women, loneliness, and politics

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0935296514/?tag=prabook0b-20

1984

Shadowing the Ground (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

(A collection of poems that deal with life and its various...)

A collection of poems that deal with life and its various stages, including death

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0819521957/?tag=prabook0b-20

1991

I Have a Name (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

(Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) The wo...)

Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, embracing all, the living and the dead.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0819522406/?tag=prabook0b-20

1996

At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties (American Poets Continuum)

(Drawing from his literary fathers Walt Whitman and Willia...)

Drawing from his literary fathers Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Bollingen Prize-winning poet David Ignatow eschews ornamentation in favor of embracing the fierce, uncompromising truths of the human spirit in his eighteenth collection.

For over half a century, David Ignatow has crafted spare, plain, haunting poetry pf working life, urban images, and dark humor. The poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ignatow is characteristically concerned with human mortality and human alienation in the world: the world as it is, defined by suffering and despair, yet at crucial times redeemed by cosmic vision and shared lives. His development as a poet is chronicled in Against the Evidence, title of the poem in part quoted above and meant by Ignatow as the metaphor for the whole body of his work. Where his previous collections have been organized thematically, Ignatow here arranges his poems “according to the decade in which they were written…returning each to its chronological order.” Against the Evidence charts the evolution of his themes from the earliest origin in the Thirties to their present extraordinary manifestation in a variety of poetic forms and modes.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0819512141/?tag=prabook0b-20

Open Between Us (Poets on Poetry)

(Interviews commenting on Ignatow's life and poetry accomp...)

Interviews commenting on Ignatow's life and poetry accompany essays, reviews, lectures, and critical studies of William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, James Wright, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472063146/?tag=prabook0b-20

Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems (American Poets Continuum)

(The final collection from one of American's most noted po...)

The final collection from one of American's most noted poets. The final collection from one of American's most noted poets.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1880238780/?tag=prabook0b-20

The One in the Many: A Poet’s Memoirs

(The author looks back on his childhood, friendships, care...)

The author looks back on his childhood, friendships, career as a poet, and the influences on his poetry

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David Ignatow was an American writer, journalist and educator. He is best known as an author of more than 25 books and a poet who wrote popular verse about a man and a daily life.

Background

David Ignatow was born on February 7, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Max and Yetta (Wilkenfeld) Ignatow.

Education

Ignatow was a student of public schools in Brooklyn, New York.

Career

In his youth, Ignatow worked in a butcher shop. He also helped out in a bindery in Brooklyn, New York, which he later owned and managed. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, he sought employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a journalist.

Ignatow's father helped him with the funding to produce his first book, Poems, in 1948. Although his book was well received, he had to continue working various jobs and find time in between to pursue writing. These jobs included work as a messenger, hospital admitting clerk, vegetable market night clerk and paper salesman. Other books followed such as The Gentle Weight Lifter and Say Pardon.

In 1962 Ignatow joined the faculty at the New School for Social Research as an instructor, and he became poetry editor of the Nation. He also served as president of the Poetry Society of America. He then began short stints at various universities, including the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas and the Vassar College. Ignatow commenced eight years at Columbia University as an adjunct professor in 1968 becoming a senior lecturer in 1977. Beginning in 1968 he also embarked on sixteen years as poet-in-residence and associate professor at the York College of the City University of New York. He became professor emeritus in 1984.

Among Ignatow's other books are Rescue the Dead, The Notebooks of David Ignatow, Facing the Tree: New Poems, Sunlight: A Sequence for My Daughter, I Have a Name, Whisper to the Earth, The One in the Many: A Poet's Memoirs and Gleanings: Uncollected Poems, 1950s and 1960s. His papers are housed at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego.

Achievements

Ignatow wrote and edited more than twenty-five books. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize and the John Steinbeck Award. He also had two Guggenheim fellowships, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award "for a lifetime of creative effort". He also won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Views

Quotations:
"My avocation is to stay alive; my vocation is to write about it; my motivation embraces both intentions, and my viewpoint is gained from a study and activity in both ambitions. The book important to my career is the next one or two or three on the fire.

"As I grow old, I find myself more bold in writing about death. My more recent poems treat the subject from almost every angle: without anger, with study and contemplation. Writing about death and dying calms what underlying fears impel me to bring the coming event out into the open. I think of this writing as a kind of triumph over time that remains to me. I look out upon trees and recognize my relationship to them, as organic quantities, in which I feel a satisfying companionship. Earth itself is for a time being, the universe no less. In short, I am a participant in a worldly epic, if significance can be found in living and dying, together with everything and everyone else. I bow to my higher self."

Membership

Ignatow was a president of the Poetry Society of America.

Interests

Writers

William Carlos Williams

Connections

Ignatow married Rose Graubart on July 20, 1940. That marriage produced 2 children - David and Yaedi.